Transition network grammars for natural language analysis
Communications of the ACM
Natural Language Information Processing: A Computer Grammmar of English and Its Applications
Natural Language Information Processing: A Computer Grammmar of English and Its Applications
Computational Linguistics
Introducing ask, a simple knowledgeable system
ANLC '83 Proceedings of the first conference on Applied natural language processing
A robust portable natural language data base interface
ANLC '83 Proceedings of the first conference on Applied natural language processing
TEAM: a transportable natural-language interface system
ANLC '83 Proceedings of the first conference on Applied natural language processing
How to drive a database front end using general semantic information
ANLC '83 Proceedings of the first conference on Applied natural language processing
ACL '80 Proceedings of the 18th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
A rule-based approach to ill-formed input
COLING '80 Proceedings of the 8th conference on Computational linguistics
Portability of syntax and semantics in DATALOG
ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
A framework for choosing a database query language
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
Generic text processing: a progress report
HLT '90 Proceedings of the workshop on Speech and Natural Language
IOTA: a full text information retrieval system
Proceedings of the 9th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
LDC-1: a transportable, knowledge-based natural language processor for office environments
ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
Knowledge based systems versus thesaurus: an architecture problem about expert systems design
SIGIR '84 Proceedings of the 7th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
A phrase-structured grammatical framework for transportable natural language processing
Computational Linguistics
Interaction of knowledge sources in a portable natural language interface
ACL '84 Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 22nd annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Semantic acquisition in TELI: a transportable, user-customized natural language processor
ACL '86 Proceedings of the 24th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
A terminological simplification transformation for natural language question-answering systems
ACL '86 Proceedings of the 24th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
An environment for acquiring semantic information
ACL '87 Proceedings of the 25th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
The logical analysis of lexical ambiguity
ACL '87 Proceedings of the 25th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
The lexical semantics of comparative expressions in a multi-level semantic processor
ACL '89 Proceedings of the 27th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
COLING '86 Proceedings of the 11th coference on Computational linguistics
An approach for response generation of restricted Bulgarian natural language queries
CompSysTech '04 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Computer systems and technologies
HLT '86 Proceedings of the workshop on Strategic computing natural language
A terminological simplification transformation for natural language question-answering systems
HLT '86 Proceedings of the workshop on Strategic computing natural language
Natural language access to multiple databases: a model and a prototype
Journal of Management Information Systems - Special section: Toward a theory of business process change management
An assessment of written/interactive dialogue for information retrieval applications
Human-Computer Interaction
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This paper describes work in progress to develop a facility for natural language access to a variety of computer databases and database systems. This facility, called IRUS for Information Retrieval using the RUS parsing system, allows users who are unfamiliar with the technical characteristics of the underlying database system to query databases using typed English input. This system can be thought of as a stand-alone query system or as part of a management information system (MIS) or a decision support system (DSS).Many systems boast of having a "user-friendly" or "English-like" or even "English" interface so that users require a minimum of special training to use the system, but most such systems use shallow, relatively ad hoc techniques that are not robust or linguistically sound. We are using a large, well-tested, theoretically-based, general parser of English that has been developed and extended in a variety of research projects for over a decade.One of the primary emphases of IRUS is transportability, which includes three types of changes: (1) changing the domain, (2) changing data bases within the same domain, and (3) changing data base systems. The use of a general parser for English is an important part of the solution to the transportability problem, but there are other parts as well, since portions of the system beyond the parser must know the conceptual content of the domain, the way in which this is reflected in a collection of datasets, and the operating characteristics of the dbms being used to access these datasets.Other researchers have investigated similar issues [8, 5, 6, 12]. We have attacked this problem by building a knowledge-based system, with procedural components independent of domain and data base structure, directed by domain and database dependent knowledge structures. We are also building tools for conveniently creating and maintaining these knowledge structures, with an eventual goal of allowing end-users to extend and modify these knowledge structures to suit their own needs. Given this set of goals, and these tools, we consider the current implementation, which uses the System 1022 dbms on the DEC KL-2060, to be only one of a set of possible implementations, and are not constraining IRUS on the basis of 1022's strengths and weaknesses.This paper presents an overview of the IRUS system, emphasizing those aspects of the design that are critical to transportability. We describe the parsing system, which is a completely independent module that has been interfaced to a variety of different applications, and then discuss the other modules which bridge the gap between the parser and the dbms.